Co-Op Founder John Affolter Dies -- He Tried To Turn His Ideals Into Reality

When schoolmates asked, John H. Affolter's children used to tell them that their father was an insurance salesman. "When you're a kid," recalls Paul Affolter, "you don't want to say that your dad is a peacenik."

Mr. Affolter sold insurance to make ends meet, but his real vocation was turning his political and social ideals into reality.

One of the guiding lights of Seattle's flourishing cooperative movement, he was best known as the founder of the Puget Consumers' Co-op. He also launched a pair of housing cooperatives in Issaquah, formed a land-preservation trust and tried his hand at a score of other cooperative ventures.

He was jailed twice for protests at the Trident nuclear-submarine base at Bangor and nearly lost his house for sending one-third of his income tax to a peace group rather than the Internal Revenue Service.

At age 70, Mr. Affolter spent a month in jail for blocking the U.S. District Courthouse steps during a rally against the Nicaraguan contras.

Mr. Affolter, who had cancer, died Thursday (March 6). He was 83.

Mr. Affolter was born in California and his idealism was forged during the Depression. His wife, Ruth, says he wandered the West during that era, working with migrants and helping his family run a fruit cooperative. He became an avid follower of Mahatma Gandhi and eventually became a Quaker.

It was the cooperative movement that brought the Affolters to Washington in 1949, when he took a job with a farmer's co-op in Walla Walla. Soon after, they moved to Seattle.

Ruth Affolter said one of his first jobs here was selling policies for Group Health, then considered a radical outcast in the medical industry.

Mr. Affolter's greatest success was the Puget Consumers' Co-op. It was originally run out of his basement as a food-buying club, with Mr. Affolter serving as the manager. Today, PCC is one of the nation's largest and most successful food cooperatives.

In the 1950s, the Affolters and several other couples bought 37 acres of land in May Valley east of Renton to build a co-op housing community.

The community, Mr. Affolter said once, was based on "faith in the inherent order, goodness and growth potential in the universe and in every person."

But that Utopian vision broke apart in the mid-1970s because of squabbling over ownership rights. Mr. Affolter spent his last years struggling to establish another community nearby named "Teramanto" or "Loving Earth."

In a 1989 newspaper interview, Mr. Affolter said such struggles kept his passion alive. "Well, setbacks really help," he said. "After all, idealism is self-liquidating. When you've achieved your ideals, what's left to do?"

Mr. Affolter rarely strayed from those ideals. Family vacations, recall his children, consisted of visiting a Hutterite community in North Dakota and other cooperatives around the country.

His daughter, Jeanne Strickland of Kent, said he sometimes paid the premiums for those who brought insurance from him. She said the Northwest Preservation Trust, a small trust her father formed to buy green space, was financed mostly with his own money.

"The world was his family," Strickland said. "In a way, that kind of put us off to the side some of the time. He didn't let anything get in the way of his sense of mission, of what work he thought needed to be done. "

Mr. Affolter also is survived by three grandchildren.

Services will be held Sunday at 2 p.m. in the Eastside Friends Meeting House, 4160 158th Ave. S.E., Bellevue. Memorials should be sent to the Eastside Friends Meeting House or the Fellowship of Reconciliation, 225 N. 70th St., Seattle 98103.